Operations, Administration, and Management (OAM) is a general term used to describe activities, processes, tools, and standards that are involved with operating, administering, and managing a network. OAM may be employed for performance monitoring, as defined in ITU-T Rec. Y.7131 (May/2006) (hereinafter “Y.7131”), such as frame loss, frame loss ratio, frame delay, or frame delay variation, in order to assist with service and capacity planning.
Specifically, such OAM functions allow for the measurement of different performance parameters, which may be used for point-to-point Ethernet connections. Performance parameters, such as frame loss ratio, frame delay, or frame delay variation, are applicable to service frames, which conform to a level of bandwidth profile at an ingress Ethernet flow point of a point-to-point Ethernet connection to be delivered to an egress Ethernet flow point. As defined in Y.1731, frame loss ratio is defined as a ratio, expressed as a percentage, of the number of service frames not delivered divided by the total number of service frames during a time interval, where the number of service frames not delivered is the difference between the number of service frames arriving at the ingress Ethernet flow point and the number of service frames delivered to the egress Ethernet flow point in the point-to-point Ethernet connection. Also defined in Y.1731, frame loss measurement may be used to collect counter values applicable for ingress and egress service frames where network resources, such as counters, maintain a count of transmitted and received data frames between pairs of network elements.
Frame loss may be generally measured by transmitting frames with information from a network element to a peer network element, followed by receiving return frames with information of both the first network element and its peer network element from the peer network element in order to calculate both a near-end frame loss measurement and far-end frame loss measurement, where near-end frame loss is associated with frame loss from the ingress data frames and far-end frame loss is associated with frame loss from the egress data frames.